Computer systems are well known in the art and have attained widespread use for providing computer power to many segments of today's modern society. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture continue to push the performance of computer hardware higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems that continue to increase in complexity and power. Computer systems have thus evolved into extremely sophisticated devices that may be found in many different settings. Computer systems are often connected to the Internet or other broad-based network in order to communicate with other computer systems, access information or other resources, or perform various tasks associated with business, personal banking, electronic commerce transactions, or other endeavors.
One application for computer systems that is increasing in importance is for use in accessing virtual universes (VUs), which are also known as virtual worlds and virtual world environments (VWEs). A VU represents a real or imaginary place using graphics, images, video, auditory data, or other sensory data to define a representation on a computer system to one or more users. The hardware and software that together create a VU provide the ability for users to interact with the VU in various ways. VUs commonly allow for multiple users to simultaneously interact with the VU, allowing the users to thus interact with each other within the VU and form a community. Current VUs such as Second Life® by Linden Lab or There® by Makena Technologies provide an interactive, three-dimensional (3D) online digital world with hundreds of thousands of users accessing the world via the Internet. In these graphical VUs, users typically are represented by an avatar within the online world, and the users may command their avatar to move within the VU, communicate with other users via their avatars, etc., and thus interact with the virtual world. VUs typically allow users (using a client program on their computer system) to use various tools to view, navigate, and modify the virtual world as well as participate in its virtual economy.
VU users typically have an inventory of items that they own, and these inventory items may be bought, sold, traded, etc. during operation of the VU. Items in a typical inventory may include clothing, virtual pets, vehicles, electronic media (e.g., music files), or other possessions. Each inventory item may represent a piece of code or other data which may be rendered in some fashion to the user during a session in the VU. Clothing inventory, for example, may be rendered as clothing for the user's avatar while a virtual dog, in another example, may render as an automated avatar that follows the user's avatar within the VU. The contents of a user's inventory are typically displayed in a hierarchical manner similar to an operating system's display of folders, subfolders, and files within a filesystem.
The current use of inventories within a VU is limited. Individuals must typically manage their own inventories, manually adding or deleting inventory items from their inventory. Also, since each inventory item often has software code necessary to render it, the stored code results in significant storage and maintenance requirements within the VU as each instance of code is stored separately. The cost of purchasing or otherwise acquiring many inventory items is also sometimes prohibitive for many users. Another problem with current inventory systems is that sharing of inventory items is not available. A user wishing to loan an inventory item to another, for example, loses control of that item, making such a loan undesirable in many cases. For items such as artwork, the owner may want to retain some control over the item. For other items where control is not as important, a copy of an item can sometimes be made in order to facilitate exchange of items but this may result in excessive use of VU resources. The lack of sharing may thus exacerbate the storage problems associated with inventory items as the code must be stored for each individual user. Managing inventories has thus become a major problem in VU space as such inventories are increasingly taken up by functional software, documents, and other such items that today reside on local drives.